LAFAYETTE — He has a real faint voice and his interview responses are never more than a short sentence.

David Hanyard is a man of few words.

To get the Lafayette Jeff senior to open up, you must put a basketball in his hands.

“I hear that I’m shy,” Hanyard said. “But I like basketball. I express myself on the court.”

Indeed Hanyard the basketball player is quite the contrary to Hanyard the off-court person.

Last week, he became the highest scoring boys basketball player in the history of Tippecanoe County, no small accomplishment when considering the long list of star players who’ve gone on to stellar Division I college careers.

His nearly 1,600 points likely exceeds the amount of words he’s spoken to media during his four years as Jeff’s go-to player.

“When he plays, he just lets his game talk,” said Lafayette Jeff senior Cortiz Buckner, a longtime teammate of Hanyard’s through school and with the Indiana Ice AAU program. “He doesn’t talk that much, but when he is on the court, you can see (his personality) in the way he plays.”

Sure, he’s gotten better at being vocal over the years, as many do when they are thrust into the spotlight at a young age.

But Hanyard still offers more journalistic fodder through the reporter’s eyes than with postgame quotes.

So what we have to gauge Hanyard’s high school career on really is by what we’ve seen.

We’ve seen a lot.

As a junior, Hanyard piloted an upset over McCutcheon in the championship game of the J&C Hoops Classic, scoring the winning point from the free throw line and earning tournament Most Valuable Player.

In his second career game, Hanyard hit 4 of 4 3-pointers and scored 19 points against Central Catholic. In his third game, he scored 22 against Harrison.

He opened his sophomore season with 28 points against Harrison and scored more than 20 eight times that year. The makings of the future career scoring leader, a record he took from former Broncho Jesse Berry, were showing early.

And yet, it was almost like this was expected.

“I remember in eighth grade he would score 20 points in the first quarter and then come out for the second quarter,” Jeff senior Danny Isbell said.

Hanyard didn’t say a lot back then either.

But every time he steps on the court — not just on game day — he transforms into the alpha male that seems nothing like the person he really is.

Bronchos coach Scott Radeker, who unlike Hanyard can be a man of many words, said Hanyard is unquestionably the team’s hardest worker.

Originally from Muncie, Hanyard moved to Lafayette at age 5, then bounced back and forth for a brief time between the two cities.

He eventually settled in Lafayette and attended Miami Elementary.

Hanyard fell in love with many aspects of the Lafayette School Corporation, but mainly it was the basketball.

By age 6, he was playing the sport and joined Dustin Harvey’s Indiana Ice program.

He played football too, a member of the varsity squad as a sophomore, but loved basketball so much he put his sole athletic focus on the sport.

His abilities just seemed to lend themselves more toward the sport, even when things went wrong.

In an eighth grade game at Tecumseh, Hanyard broke his thumb pinning a shot against the backboard.

The silver lining was he realized how high he could leap.

A year later, he was dunking and despite only growing to be 5-foot-10, he can wow you with his propensity to get above the rim.

“I don’t know what his vertical is, but I’ve seen him do 360 dunks and just get up and throw it down,” Isbell said.

Basketball also taught life lessons to Hanyard.

He loved the game so much that when he was disciplined by being suspended, he decided it was time to mature.

No amount of trouble was worth having the game taken away from him.

So he kept his nose clean.

And he scored. And scored. And scored at a rate unlike anything fans around this town have ever seen.

He never had any idea how much he was scoring.

“I just try to make plays,” Hanyard said.

Radeker said not once did Hanyard approach him to ask how many points he had.

Hanyard learned of his career point total twice.

The first time was at Rensselaer last season when the game was temporarily halted to acknowledge his inclusion as a member of Jeff’s 1,000-point club.

The second was last Tuesday when he broke Berry’s record of 1,555 career points and the game was stopped to honor Hanyard assuming his place atop a list of great players.

“He’s put in the work. He has lived basketball for years,” Radeker said. “I am happy that in a team sport, he was able to get a nice individual accomplishment like that.”

Hanyard plans to play college basketball, but he doesn’t know where.

Tippecanoe County’s career scoring leader could play his final game Tuesday night, though, when the Bronchos face Kokomo in the Class 4A, Sectional 7 tournament at Jeff’s Crawley Center.

For all his accomplishments, Hanyard has never been on the winning side of a sectional game. The Bronchos have not won a sectional title in seven years.

A sectional championship would mean more than any records Hanyard set.

“We know what we’ve got to do,” the softspoken guard said. “We’ve got to leave it all out on the court.”